Egyptian Hieroglyphics: Cracking the God's Words

Start with what the script actually was, because almost everyone starts wrong. The Egyptians called their writing 'the god's words' and believed it a gift from Thoth, the ibis-headed god of writing and magic; a sign, to them, was not a neutral mark but a thing with power, which is why dangerous figures in a tomb were sometimes carved deliberately maimed, so they could not act against the dead. But sacred is not the same as symbolic picture-writing, and this is the single most important correction to make. Hieroglyphs are a full writing system that records the sounds of a spoken language. They mix three kinds of sign. Logograms, where a picture stands for a whole word (a sun disc for ra, 'sun'). Phonograms, signs that spell sounds, including a set of roughly two dozen single-consonant signs that work almost like an alphabet, though Egyptian wrote only the consonants and left the vowels out. And determinatives, silent signs added to the end of a word to mark its category, a pair of walking legs after a verb of motion, so a reader could tell otherwise-identical spellings apart. Classical Middle Egyptian used about 750 signs; the temple inscriptions of the very late period ran to several thousand through elaborate scribal games. To read a wall was to read sound, word, and category at once. The popular idea that each little picture is a stand-alone mystic symbol is not a small misreading. It is the exact error that kept the script unreadable for fourteen hundred years.

Over the centuries one script became three hands for three jobs, and here another myth needs puncturing: the cursive forms did not replace the carved one, they ran alongside it. Formal, pictorial hieroglyphs stayed the monumental script of temple and tomb for the whole of Egyptian history. For everyday speed, scribes wrote hieratic, a flowing shorthand of the same signs drawn with a reed brush on papyrus, used for letters, accounts, literature, and science from the Old Kingdom onward. Later, around 650 BCE, an even faster cursive called demotic took over daily business, contracts and letters and stories, and it is the middle of the three scripts on the Rosetta Stone. All three were the same language in different clothes. And reading any of them was a rare privilege: literacy in ancient Egypt is estimated at just one to five percent of the population. Scribes were a trained professional class, schooled at temple and palace, and they knew their worth; a Middle Kingdom text called the Satire of the Trades sells the profession by running down every other job in Egypt as misery by comparison. A handful of women held the title 'female scribe,' and letters by women survive, but the schools were, in practice, for men.

By the time Europe went looking, the god's words had been silent for well over a thousand years, and Europe had talked itself into a fantasy about them. Following a late-antique writer named Horapollo, Renaissance scholars grew certain each hieroglyph was a self-contained allegory of some sacred truth, a picture-puzzle of mystic wisdom with no connection to ordinary speech; learned men wrote whole volumes 'translating' the signs this way, and every word of it was invention. What broke the spell was a piece of political boilerplate. In 1799, soldiers in Napoleon's army rebuilding a fort near the Delta town of Rashid, which Europeans called Rosetta, turned up a broken black slab carved in 196 BCE with a decree honoring the boy-king Ptolemy V, written three times over: once in hieroglyphs, once in demotic, and once in Greek. The Greek was readable. Here at last was the same text in a known tongue set beside the lost script, and the same royal name, Ptolemy, waiting to be matched sign for sign. The race to use it was on.

So who cracked it? The honest answer refuses the tidy version in either direction. It is not true that Young did the real work and Champollion took the glory, and it is not true that Champollion did it alone out of nothing. Young's early study built a partial framework, the cartouche method and the first phonetic readings, that helped make the fuller breakthrough possible. Champollion supplied the decisive insight Young never reached, that the entire script was phonetic, and turned scattered clues into a working system that has held up for two centuries. The dispute between the two men was bitter and ran for years, thick with English-versus-French national pride on both sides, Young insisting Champollion had built on his discoveries, Champollion insisting the real system was his alone. But credit here is not a fixed pie to be fought over. Young opened the door partway; Champollion went through it. Both things are true, and the achievement belongs, in different measure, to both of them, and to earlier scholars like Silvestre de Sacy and Johan Akerblad whose first work on the demotic came before either.

It is worth remembering how completely the knowledge had been lost, and why. Hieroglyphs were carved for the last known time on 24 August 394 CE, when a priest named Nesmeterakhem cut a short inscription into a wall at the temple of Philae, in Egypt's far south, adding a hope that it would endure 'for all time and eternity.' The Roman closure of Egypt's pagan temples a few years earlier had severed the script's living roots; Philae, sitting just beyond the empire's southern edge, held on a little longer than the rest before it too fell quiet. After that, the line of people who could read the signs simply ran out, and stayed broken until Champollion, fourteen centuries later. Even now, what survives is skewed by chance. Egyptian scribes wrote most of their letters and literature on papyrus, and papyrus rots in damp ground; the overwhelming bulk of what we can still read comes from the dry sands of places like the Fayum and Oxyrhynchus, not because Egyptians only wrote there, but because that is where the writing lasted. What we know of Egyptian writing is a survivor's sample, shaped by climate as much as by what was ever actually set down.

Two persistent myths deserve a flat refusal, not a both-sides hearing. The first is the old mystical one already met: that hieroglyphs are pure symbolic picture-writing, each sign a wordless emblem of sacred mystery. They are not, and the whole point of Champollion's achievement was proving it; an account that treated the mystical reading as half-right would be quietly undoing its own subject. The second is newer and stranger: the online claim that certain Egyptian carvings depict advanced technology, an electric lamp in a relief at Dendera, a helicopter and other aircraft among the signs at Abydos. These are not mysteries; they are known artifacts of stone. The Abydos 'helicopter' is a documented palimpsest: one pharaoh's carved titles were plastered over and recut with another's, and the two overlapping, half-erased sets of signs happen to leave a shape a modern eye reads as an aircraft. It records nothing but the ordinary reuse of a wall. A third, gentler myth is worth naming too, that hieroglyphs are a universal language anyone can intuitively read. They are not; they record one specific language, Egyptian, and take years of training to read, which is precisely why their silence, once the readers were gone, lasted as long as it did.